Rise (23 page)

The kids start school next Monday. I hear that the teachers are going to try to cram as much basic education into them as they can, because the plan is that once kids turn 15 they’ll be out with the adults rebuilding. The teachers here have thought about it a lot, and basic skills and trades are going to be the major focus now. Math and sciences are still to be taught, as are languages and a few other subjects, but the rest is on the back burner until the crisis is over. When will that be? Who knows…?

I am so sore I can barely move. First day of the training. Drill sergeant from Hell. Shit, man, I’m not in the army, I’m a civilian. Holy hell, I have pain in places I didn’t know there were muscles. It’s going to be worse tomorrow. And the insane part is Jess is arguing she should be in training too. Even more insane, I agreed. We’re going to talk to Captain Couper about that in the morning. Now I go to bed, though. Ouch.

I did learn some interesting things though. Apparently I was doing some of the gun stuff right, like selecting targets and single shots per target. But we were crossing each other’s field of fire something awful. Miracle we didn’t kill each other. Got to work on that. Hopefully it doesn’t snow before we head out for the first retrieval.

School starts tomorrow for the kids. Neither one is sure what to think about that. It’s technically kindergarten for Michael, and for Megan it’s kind of a return to grade three. She’s gotten basic math, reading, and science down, but it’s been so long since she’s practiced these things that it might take some getting used to again.

Training for me is going well. Jess is out right now taking a turn on the night watch on the south tower. Once the dude in charge of the watch found out about her sniper skills he came over and practically demanded she take a few shifts a week, and she was happy to. She gets to be in the next go round of training too, even if she only uses it here. We’ve talked about how I’ll be away on retrieval and salvage missions a lot, and she’s made me promise to watch out for Darren, and made Darren promise to watch my ass too. We don’t want any close encounters again.

That’s something I should mention. Yesterday I was talking to Sgt. Lindt, who was teaching us First Aid and basic zombie ‘biology’, and he asked if any of our group had been “up close and personal” with a zombie yet. I waved. He asked how close it was. I showed him the cast with the tooth marks on the wrist, and then told him what happened. He seemed appalled by how close we’d come to the damned things so often. A lot of the people here haven’t even seen a zombie yet, so it’s kind of unreal for them. But a lot more have seen them, so they know what we’re up against. I get the cast off at the end of training, just over two more weeks. I also talked to some people in the class and in the town about being on the crew. So far I have three possible, and two confirmed (Darren and an Army guy named Corporal Eric Craig). The possibles will get back to me within a few days, and then we start training some together and getting to know one another.

I heard a few undead got near the fence the other night from the east. They were shot down by snipers before they got within 200 feet of the fences, and the bodies were burned in the morning. The town has strict rules here about bodies. Any death for whatever reason has to be reported, and any sickness, even a cold, goes to the hospital to be checked out. If someone you know dies you have to call the Body Squad right away. That’s not the real name, it’s a nickname for a bunch of people who take control of corpses before they potentially reanimate, and all bodies of the dead will be burned ASAP now. There are patrols through the town now at all hours, armed and driving trucks and cars.

It’s cold out there now. Frost is common on the cars in the mornings. We expect snow any time, and it’s only the very start of Fall. I have the feeling this is going to be a long, terrible winter.

I am so tired. The training is severely short so they cram a lot of things in to our 10 hour days. I have learned that suppressed weapons are a wonderful thing. How I wish I’d had silencers before. And the C7A1? Sweet hell, that’s a great weapon, and now that I have an idea how to use it I think I’ll hang up the carbine I have been lugging around. And radios! How cool is this?

The other primary weapon we have been trained on is the 9mm Browning, similar enough to the Glock that I have no trouble using it. Plentiful ammunition for the Browning, so I think we’ll be carrying those on salvage runs.

Jess got her hands on a LRSW (Long Range Sniper Weapon) that one of the Army guys here has. She was in heaven for the hour she got to play with it. She gave it back, but told me she was going to talk to the base and see if she could get into the sniper training they do. I think they’ll take her, with her record so far. She’s already scheduled to take the 3-week course starting next Monday.

The cast is itching. The skin under it, I mean. I can’t wait to get this thing off.

We had an emergency last night. Someone died down the street and it was unreported. So, zombie outbreak in town with a few casualties, and of course I was right in the middle of it. I was home with Jess, and we had put the two kids to bed a few hours before. Jess and I were working on interior barricades that we could slip over the door frames and windows, and seal in case of an emergency, when I heard a sound of breaking glass though the window. Jess and I immediately looked at each other, then outside. I closed the window, and Jess picked up the Glock that I had hung on the wall nearby.

First things first. Check on the kids, who were sleeping peacefully. Check all the doors and windows downstairs, and the basement. Jess took up her rifle and shut off the lights, while I got geared up with the Browning, Glock, and flashlight. We checked outside, all around, and saw no motion, so I went outside on the front step and listened. It was very quiet, and I was hoping someone had just broken a window. That would be great. Then I could go back inside and have some more dinner, a beer, not shoot anything.

It was not to be. I smelled the decay right before the first one shambled into view. Jess was still inside, so I opened the door and told her to call the Body Squad. Then I locked the door and shut it, and stepped down to deal with the undead walking towards me. The shambling horror approaching me was one of my neighbors, Mr. Hamlyn. As I waited for him to get within range I saw another one step out of his house, three down and across the street. Shit, it was his wife, Barb. God damn it. They had a grown son in the base, but I think it was just them in the house. Doug Hamlyn, or what used to be Doug before tonight, shambled over my way. His wife was faster. There was blood on her mouth and hands, and a whole lot of missing tissue on Doug’s neck and shoulders where she’d bit him. He’d leaked a lot, and his flesh was eerily pale in the streetlight. I shot him in the top of the head when he was about twenty feet from me, one shot that passed through his forehead with a wet smack. I aimed at his wife and hit her in the face before he even hit the ground. She spun around and got back up, and her face was a real mess now. The bullet hadn’t been gentle, and it had torn out one eye and half her cheek when it hit. She was far faster than her dead husband had ever been, living or undead, and she was coming right at me as lights were going on in the houses nearby. I aimed again, and just as she stepped over Doug’s body I shot twice more. Both rounds went clean through her skull, and she fell on top of her husband.

The living neighbors arrived, mostly armed, and within a few minutes there were a dozen of us searching the Hamlyns’ house. It was empty, and we were leaving again when the Body Squad arrived with a truck full of troops. It was pretty obvious what had happened to them, and their son arrived after they had taken the bodies away. We had to explain to him that his mom had died of a heart attack, and that his father had been killed by her when she rose. It wasn’t fun at all, and he was glaring at me when he found out it was me who shot them.

I went back inside once it was obvious the situation was under control. Jess and I sat in the kitchen and talked for a while. We are going to work on some more barricades over the next week, and I want to get the Jeep fuelled up again and restock our bug-out bags. Maybe we’ll stock the Jeep with some non-perishable foods and have a rotating water cache in it too. This incident just made me really paranoid.

After an x-ray today at the hospital here, I got the cast removed. My arm is pale and felt a bit clammy when I touched it, but the bone set nicely. The skin is all smooth. It feels kind of neat, actually. I kept the cast. The medical staff had a few raised eyebrows when they saw the tooth marks on it.

Training is interesting. With the constant weapons drills, radio lessons, basic tactical classes, and vehicle familiarization, it’s a wonder we have time for field first aid, biology, and weapons maintenance. The instructors keep complaining that they want more time to train us. Three weeks isn’t enough, apparently. They want five or six weeks. But the base CO said three, so we get three. Jess has started her classes too. It’s a good thing the school doubles as a daycare with both of us in this.

Christie stopped by for dinner today, and we all spent a while playing with Michael and Megan. She’s been provisionally accepted into the Air Force, with a group of other young and not-so-young recruits. She passed the aptitude tests, and was able to offer some real-life anti-zombie experiences to help get her in. She seems pretty happy about it. I also got a call from Sarah in Athabasca. We talked for about an hour, catching up on the latest news. A group of about sixty undead were destroyed less than a kilometer from the main barricade into town, and the next day thirty more were seen and destroyed. They had both come from the south, and there is a worry that more will show up. She sounded pretty confident though. More survivors have been brought in, and another group will be coming out here fairly soon. We said goodbye, each wishing the other good luck.

Darren is thriving in this town. He’s doing really well in the classes, and has made some friends among the youngsters here. I think he has a girlfriend, but he’s not saying.

Some more survivors were brought in from the south in a plane today. The plane landed at the base while I was there for training, so we heard all about it. The plane was a passenger jet, about a twelve seater, and had come from Montana. Apparently the pilot had scrounged enough avgas for the trip after hearing a radio signal from the last Hercules heading to Comox. He and seven others had gathered what they could and scrounged all the avgas they could find, fuelled up this plane, and flown here. They landed on fumes, and had no idea what to expect when they arrived. I heard they were so overjoyed to find a large enclave of humanity that several of them broke down and had to be taken to the base medical center.

I’ve heard tales from other survivors. There’s a man in Cold Lake here who survived from the start on his own, traveling from Victoria on the day the outbreaks started there, by boat up to the Alaskan shore, and from there he took a car south, ending up here after three months.

There’s a woman and her son who survived in Edmonton for six weeks before fleeing on a motorcycle. They made it to Vermilion before they ran out of luck. They spent another month trapped in a small grocery store while the population of the town tried to get inside. They were rescued by some passing survivors who belonged to some bike gang. They’d picked up these two and they had all made it here, picking up another three survivors on the way.

And the news from the rest of the world is trickling in. There’s a group in Michigan that managed to get hold of a really powerful broadcaster, bounced a signal off a satellite, and told us that they had about fifty people safe inside a housing project.

The US government in Hawaii has also shown itself again, making promises to the American people that they’ll rid the continental US of the undead within ten years. I laughed when I heard that! No mention of Canada or Mexico. And ten years? Good luck! And I really have to wonder who they were talking to. I doubt more than ten people in the US were even listening.

I also heard today that Britain was silenced within a few weeks of the initial outbreaks, but has recently been heard from. A British submarine surfaced somewhere in the east, off Newfoundland, apparently, and managed to resupply with a raid on Halifax. I don’t know where this story comes from though, so it might be bogus.

It’s quite relieving to hear that this isn’t the end of the world after all. We’ve suffered a massive depopulation, there’s an enemy we can’t reason with that’s trying to eat us, and the global society we once had has been shattered, but there’s still hope. Always hope.

Time to get to work now. Classes are over, and three days from now we are heading south to scout out the area around Vegreville. Captain Couper came again to talk about this mission. We are looking for fuel, food, and whatever survivors we can find. There are several towns in the area that we are to check out, and anything that we can find we are to mark and secure if possible, and return with if we can. A lot of “if’s” in that, eh? Too many, I think, but with the world in this state, it is the very best we can do.